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Friday, December 26, 2014

Kodak's finally making smartphones

For a while there it looked like Kodak's moment had come and gone, but the past few months have seen the imaging icon fight back from the brink of irrelevance. Now the company's planning to push a Kodak-branded smartphone, and thankfully it's not going to sue everyone in the business along the way this time. To be clear, Kodak won't actuallymake its own devices -- instead, it's going to farm out most of the development work to an English company called Bullitt (you know, the people behind those uber-rugged Caterpillar phones). Oh, and it won't look anything like the mockup you see above... we hope.

The details are still pretty scarce at this point, but Kodak's first phone will obviously play up the company's photography chops. Alas, there's no mention in the official PR about sensor sizes, lens apertures or dedicated imaging hardware of any sort. In fact, it seems like we might be looking at a device that does all of its visual heavy lifting (think "bespoke image capture, management and sharing features") through software. That wouldn't necessarily be terrible, but really, why slap the historic Kodak brand on a device that doesn't seem equipped to do it justice? We won't pass judgment on the thing until we see it at CES in a few weeks; here's hoping we're in for a pleasant surprise.